Magician to appear at alma mater for fundraiser Saturday

February 20, 2014

BUNKER HILL - Of all the tricks and illusions that magician Mario Orsini has perfected, the one that confounds him is perhaps the most subtle.

He's mastered the art of levitating objects, slicing blades through a wicker basket without piercing the assistant inside, turning water into sand. But he continues to work on the age-old trick of tearing a playing card into four pieces and - before the audience's eyes - making it whole again.

Orsini, who grew up in Bunker Hill and attended Musselman High School, will be appearing at the high school Saturday for a fundraising event to benefit the school's alumni association. Proceeds from the event will go toward scholarships for Musselman graduates.

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Photo courtesy of 3MI Photography

Local magician Mario Orsini is shown. Orsini will perform at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Musselman High School auditorium.

The alumni association awarded 10 $500 scholarships last year, said association Vice President Joyce Kees. That was an all-time high.

"We're shooting for 15 this year," she said.

Orsini was a member of the first graduating class at the new Musselman, in 1999. He knows his last name is practically a household word in the Panhandle, due to his cousins in the appliance business.

"All of my appliances are from Orsini's Appliance," he said.

This will the second time that Orsini has performed at Musselman.

"It's like a Las Vegas-style show," Kees said.

Orsini first picked up magic as a child, but stuck with it only briefly, he said. It wasn't until a year or two after college that he took to it seriously.

At first, magic "was always just for friends and family," Orsini said.

"It was always the same audience," he said. "I didn't know what I could do with it."

But after earning an undergraduate degree in criminal justice and a graduate degree in communications, Orsini was drawn back to the world of magic.

"I'm probably one of the most educated magicians in the country," he said.

At a magic shop in Atlantic City, Orsini "bought a few things and started practicing in my free time," he said.

He worked on his craft for two years. Eventually, he was ready to perform, "instead of using it to show friends and get free drinks at the bar," he said.

Orsini staged a one-hour show, his first real theatrical production, in 2010. It included about a dozen separate routines.

"Some of them may have had multiple pieces of magic in each one," he said.

Now Orsini fills his schedule with corporate events, theater shows, fairs, festivals, private parties and college shows. He travels the East Coast with a truck full of illusions and stage sets, and sometimes works with an assistant. He has appeared five times at the Miss West Virginia pageant, and has employed pageant winners as the beauties he has placed in a magic box to slice apart. He has invested thousands of dollars in props, he said, and sometimes he works with his father to build new pieces for his show.

"As a performer, what I like about it is seeing the audience's reaction," he said.

Himself a fan of magicians such as David Copperfield, Orsini loves "the moment of astonishment," he said - "The feeling you get after something amazing has happened."

He has seen Copperfield three times and met him twice.

"The magic community is really small," Orsini said. "You're not separated that far from your heroes."

Orsini enjoys giving that moment of astonishment to the audience. The grinding travel for single-night performances is the hard part of his work.

"The travel part: that's what I get paid for," he said. "I do the shows for free."

A soup and sandwich dinner at 6 p.m. in the school cafeteria will be followed by Orsini's performance at 7 p.m. Saturday in the auditorium. The total ticket price is $10.